From the time I could run, I understood myself to be an athlete. Early on, I played baseball and then softball. In adolescence, I was devoted to basketball, playing year-round for my high school team. By the time I went to college, however, I had stopped playing sports. I was hungry to reinvent myself in a new community without the drag of old identities from back home, “athlete” included. 

As I walked around the activities fair during orientation week, I was overwhelmed by all the student groups I could join. And yet, before I knew it, I started shopping for a new sport to play. Field hockey sounded interesting. Or maybe rugby. Would I enjoy ultimate? Rowing? As I rounded a corner, I saw a hand-lettered sign that made me smirk: Chix with Stix. “Wanna play lacrosse with us?” one of the peppy girls behind the table asked. I told her I had never held a lacrosse stick in my life. “Great!” she chirped. “We’ll teach you!”

Despite my skepticism, I wrote my newly minted email address on the sign-up sheet. A week later I found myself with a stick in my hand, a kilt around my waist, and a spot on the women’s club lacrosse team. As promised, the girls from the table -- who’d played at East Coast prep schools with big-time lacrosse programs, by the way -- taught me and several other newbies everything from how to catch, throw, and cradle a ball to how to defend a shot on goal while staying out of an attacker’s shooting space. We practiced a little and played a game or two in the fall and then had a four-week season in the spring. Hardly the all-consuming, hyper-committed experience of playing sports I had known growing up.

What’s more, my club lacrosse team did not have the hierarchical structure I knew so well: head coach; assistant coaches; better, meaner, older girls; lucky-to-be-there younger ones; team managers who filled water bottles and hauled equipment. We didn’t have a coach at all, but we did have captains (the peppy chix from the table) because somebody had to decide what we were going to do at practice. 

Looking back, I realize club lacrosse was my first taste of community sports -- a model in which everyone must work together off the field to have a chance to compete on it. Aside from a small amount of funding from our university, we were mostly on our own to figure out how to meet our equipment needs and transport ourselves to tournaments around the Midwest. For each weekend tournament, the captains would sign their lives away to rent passenger vans and drive around campus to collect us bleary-eyed underclassmen before the sun was up. When it was our turn to host a tournament, we sold t-shirts to fund the dozens of cans of spray paint we needed to line our rocky, balding field. All of this extra work was part of the charm of being on the team, but we were full-time college students and had that kind of time.

Lacrosse was my anchor and my outlet for all four years of college. I came to love women’s lacrosse for the sport itself, for its balance of physicality and finesse, but what I loved more was having the chance to play something and having a team to play it with, our merry band of almost-athletes and all-stars. 

My lacrosse experience reminded me that even if I wasn’t dedicating my life to sports anymore, playing on a team was still an essential part of me, and it was an animating force in my increasingly cerebral adult life. When I moved to a new city after college, I went looking for that same spark and ended up playing in several women’s slowpitch softball leagues. I loved being part of a community of women for whom playing sports was not just recreational but imperative.

It has been several years now since I have lived in that city and played a team sport with other women. In those intervening years, I got married and had two children. The small town I live in now used to have a women’s softball league, but it fell apart about the time I moved here. The organizers were having trouble finding enough committed players and subs week to week. They were growing tired of the constant coordinating, and the parks department wasn’t nearly as interested in supporting a small league for women as a more popular one for men. 

I understand these challenges and why the league organizers -- many of whom were women who had businesses and families to care for -- had to let it go. Oh yes, I understand. More than ever I feel the tension between the responsibilities of my adult life and the needs of my body, the wistful pull of my inner athlete who longs to send a ball over the fence in left-center, who would give just about anything to sprint downfield for a breakaway goal. 

The Northeast Ohio Women’s Sports Alliance (NOWSA) understands this, too. The organization, which started as Cleveland Women’s Sports in 2018 and in a very short time has expanded its outreach into more of northeast Ohio, helps support community-based sports, women’s sports teams, and individual female athletes. 

The leaders of NOWSA, including co-founder Barbara Anthony, identify with the female athlete experience and know how profoundly sport can influence wellness and empower women throughout their lives. As it happens, Barb and I were basketball teammates in high school. This essayI wrote for Issue 1 of The Under Review helped put us back in touch and catalyzed a meaningful conversation about our past athletic endeavors and how sport is still deeply important to us today. 

I recognize in NOWSA’s work the spirit of my club lacrosse captains, who did so many big and small things to make sure we had the chance to play. Perhaps the biggest small thing they did was inviting us to join them. It excites and inspires me to know that NOWSA is working at a regional level to remove barriers so women can find and enjoy sports, which, for many of us, means the chance to keep finding and enjoying ourselves. 

Carlee Tressel Alson is the author of the corporate history Rolling On: Two Hundred Years of Blair Iron and Steel. When she’s not writing about steel or sports, she’s farming with her family in rural northwest Indiana, a state known well for its basketball and known less for leading the U.S. in steel production.